A sympathetic portrait of an artist who remains elusive.
Biography of a secretive photographer who became legendary after her death.
In 2007, Vivian Maier (1926-2009) failed to make payments on five storage lockers in Chicago, causing the owner to offer its contents—hundreds of boxes—at auction. The boxes contained material from decades of hoarding: books, magazines, newspapers, and, most astonishingly, photographs—albums, prints, negatives, color slides, and more than 1,000 rolls of undeveloped film. By the time Maier died two years later, two of the buyers, Jeffrey Goldstein and real estate businessman John Maloof, already had initiated what was to become a lucrative “Vivian Maier Industrial Complex,” selling, exhibiting, and promoting Maier’s photographs and turning her into a celebrity. In her debut biography, Bannos (Art Theory and Practice/Northwestern Univ.) offers a cleareyed investigation of Maier’s life, aiming to penetrate the myths surrounding her and to assess her stature as an artist. In a website, several monographs, and a movie, Maloof significantly shaped the myth of Maier as “a mysterious French nanny who was also, secretly, a photographer.” Although Maloof did not cooperate with Bannos in her research, the thousands of images he published on his website supplemented more than 20,000 images from other collections, which Bannos attentively analyzed. Maier did earn a living as a nanny in New York and Chicago, but her work as a photographer dominated her life. Even when she had children in her care, she hung a camera around her neck and engaged in “purposeful” sightseeing in the U.S. and abroad. She refused to exhibit her photographs, though, and she “selectively, sometimes imaginatively, addressed any questions about her past.” Families who employed her found her eccentric, demanding, opinionated and, as she aged, paranoid. In alternating chapters, Bannos juxtaposes Maier’s biography with her afterlife. She effectively contextualizes Maier’s aesthetics within the history of photography, and she makes a persuasive case for her talent and originality. In the end, though, the author is left with unanswered questions about Maier’s personal life, her motivations to photograph, and her artistic aims.
A sympathetic portrait of an artist who remains elusive.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-47075-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
